The Heritage Foundation
3/23/2010
Another day, two new polls showing the American people are strongly against the health care plan President Barack Obama will sign into law today. According to CNN, 59% of Americans oppose President Obama’s plan. And according to CBS News, 48% of Americans oppose the plan (with 33% in strong opposition) compared to only 37% who support it (with only 13% in strong support). Digging deeper into the CBS poll, we find that 76% of Americans disapprove of how Congress is handling its job on health care, 46% think Congress has spent too much time on health care, and 49% believe the rules and procedures used in Congress to get the current health care bill passed have been mostly unfair.
But the leftist majorities in Congress just do not care what the American people think. Today, the Senate will press forward with work on the proposed “fix-it” bill through the reconciliation process. You may have thought it was impossible to make the policy and process of Obamacare even worse, but that is exactly what this reconciliation bill does:
Abuse of Process: According to the Congressional Research Service, 19 reconciliation measures have been enacted into law since the procedure’s first use in the Carter administration. The record shows that reconciliation has been used for virtually all imaginable scenarios — save one: There is no precedent for using it to enact a once-in-a-generation rewrite of the relationship between Americans and their government that appeals exclusively to one side of the aisle. But that is exactly what Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) is attempting to do. According to the latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, a plurality of the American people strongly oppose this procedural tactic for this highly unpopular policy.
Read the rest at the Morning Bell.
